Wedding Blog

Oh my, where to begin? Well, most of you know that my whole spring break here in Kansas City has been devoted to working on the various pieces of wedding stationery–invitations, rehearsal invites, map cards, thank you notes. Consequently, I’m now at a point where I don’t care if I never see a pad of silver ink, or a rubber star stamp, or blue Paper Source cardstock ever again!

I designed my stationery last fall, and placed the Paper Source order in time to use them for my STD’s too. I was inspired by two designs:

(via kenziekate)

and

(via Alia Designs)

I then used these to design the text and layout of my invites, using two fonts: Copperplate Gothic Light, and Celeste:

I used MS Word to create a text box with the dimensions of my A6 special cut cardstock, and then when I started printing them I tweaked the margins a bit so it fit squarely on the paper (which is why you should buy extras, btw!).

It takes inkjet ink a while to dry on this paper, so the process was rather slow and gradual. But luckily we have a massive antique dining table in our second kitchen that I could dry them on. After they dried, I took them back to my work table and stamped each one with silver ink and my rubber star stamps:

Here are some close-ups of the stamped pattern (sorry it’s still not that clear):

Then, after the silver ink dried too, I attached the second layer to the back of the invites. For this I used A7-sized black cardstock, also from Paper Source. I felt that this gave them more dimension:

To attach the two layers, I used spray glue:

and many, many layers of newspaper to protect my work surface. Here are the two separate elements:

After gluing the layers together, I had to let it dry for a few more hours:

~~~
Mr, Blueberry designed the map cards himself, using Paint Shop Pro and Google Maps. I honestly don’t know how he did it, so I’ll be letting him make a tutorial to post here in a few days.

~~~
I had designed the brunch enclosure and response cards in much the same way as I did the invites.

The brunch will be a fairly intimate affair; we only invited approx. 25% of our guests to it. Guests who are invited will receive the brunch enclosure and this response card:

(I filled in the second ___ with the number of guests invited!)

Guests who aren’t invited to the brunch won’t receive the brunch enclosure, and will get a response card with no brunch reply space.

Here’s my hand-addressed reply envelopes:

Anticipating the postage increase and being of a “better safe than sorry” mindset, I added 4c stamps to the 39c wedding stamps I bought. I know the increase will be no more than 3c, but those stamps are pretty ugly so I figured a penny extra per envelope wouldn’t hurt anything

~~~
I left the outer envelopes and response envelopes plain, but put a bit of detail onto the inner envelopes:

The invitation and inner envelope together:

An example of my writing on the outer envelope:

Before I began assembly, I took care of the personalized elements of each invitation: the name and address on the outer envelope, the name on the inner envelope, the number of guests on the response card, and the pencilled-in number I discreetly wrote on the back of each response card.

This last idea was something I picked up from one of my fellow ‘Bees (I’m sorry I can’t remember who!). The idea being, that some guests won’t write in their names on the response card, so instead of receiving anonymous responses you can write in a number which corresponds to the number on the guest list–if Grandma is #23 on your guest list and you receive a blank response card with the #23 that you wrote on the back, you’ll still know it was her!

So by the time I began assembling, I’d already grouped together and double-checked each person’s inner and outer envelope, and response card:

Once everything was printed and dried, stamped and addressed, I began the assembly process. This required a lot of concentration–I couldn’t carry on a conversation as I worked on this step. I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget to give someone a map, or send someone else a brunch enclosure but no brunch response card, etc!

All the different elements together:

~~~
Finally, here are the thank you notes:

Well, I hope that was enough of a picture-heavy post for you all! Let me know if you have any unanswered questions!